“You cannot be expected to appreciate it,” he said. “Your mother was a vessel potential for holiness. As you have the indelicacy to question of her past sorrows, you shall be given the truth in full. Better that than the half measure, which would only instigate your base spirit, I fear, to distortion and exaggeration. She had been ensnared by a villain whom she had lent herself to reclaim. It was the usual case of a promise given and forsworn. I never asked or learned his name. In the eyes of Heaven she was a wife; and any confession of the truth would, with such a man as Lord Skene, have been held merely to justify him in his attempts to claim her to ungodliness. As a fact, he was greatly infatuated--accepted the assumption that you were born in wedlock--engaged tacitly to ask no questions, but to accept on its merits the blessing which had been vouchsafed him.” “Then, at least, in the eyes of Heaven, which you represent, Lady Skene is a bigamist.” He seemed, to my surprise, to accept this casuistry with a certain relief. “Put it that way if you like,” he said. “She was distinctly, from the moral point of view, a wife already, though legally unbound.” “Then why, from the moral point of view, am I a child of sin?” He began to stammer hopelessly. “I will tell you,” I said. “It is because of the wrong she has done me, and would visit, like a woman, upon the innocent head of her disgrace. And you hate me because she does, and because you have made her interests your own. I think you have played your cards very well, Mr Pugsley.” He bristled through all his yellow skin. “Leave my house,” he said. “I will leave it,” I answered, “but I will ask you another question first. What was my mother’s position, occupation, when she married?” “Not another word,” he cried. “I have said too much already. O!”--he shook a wild finger at me--“why would she never accept my advice, given long ago, to place you out in some respectable family! I always foresaw that the time would come when you would begin to quarrel with your bread and butter--to bite the hand that fed you--to----” “To put myself right with my stepfather,” I said. “If you attempt it,” he cried--“if you dare--the wrath of the Almighty will fall upon your presumptuous head!” I laughed. “Well, I will think it over,” I said, and turned and left him. CHAPTER VII. MORGIANA